I
Out of his loneliness, Aubrey Carlyle told me this story one night: not
at Malmanor Park, where, with his sister Esther as hostess, he has
entertained us all so often, for he said that he could not have told me
this story at Malmanor, but in the library of his house in London.
Aubrey Carlyle, who is a man of middle years, had never told this story
to any one before, and I can only think he told it to me because I had
been a great friend to his wife Gloria. I have not seen Gloria Carlyle
for three years, though I have very often wished to, for she is a lady
of uncommon quality and was a very loyal friend. Of her George Tarlyon
once said that she was a gentleman among women; “And that is a very rare
thing,” added Shelmerdene, “for the only advantage most women have over
men is in the fact that they are not gentlemen.” But that is as it may
be.
The last I heard of Gloria Carlyle was that she had settled in Italy and
was living in a villa near Florence. And I saw a vision of Gloria in a
very white villa among the myrtle and magnolia and waxen camellias of
that country, and walking in lanes where green lizards moved swiftly up
grey stone walls--dear Gloria of the tiger-tawny hair and the funny
crooked smile like a naughty fairy’s. She was a very sweet and
thoughtful woman, and her voice never, never intruded, it was like a
hidden stream, quite delicious....
Aubrey Carlyle told me that I could tell or write this story as I
wished, saying that it might better the knowledge of men about their
womenfolk; “for there are too many men,” he said, “who do not know their
jobs as regards their women. And I have learnt mine too late.”
My friend Aubrey is a man of an aloof and almost haughty demeanour,
which may have perhaps induced that rather abrupt manner that has
repelled many people from him; for though a certain aloofness was
thought very proper to the looks of an English gentleman of a past time,
it is now held to be quite out of place among the corrupt genialities of
the democratic state. A tall, dark-looking man he was, and elegant in a
tweedy sort of way. Rich always, he had never been a wastrel, and London
bored him to distraction--or “to distinction,” as an American out of
Texas once said. A Tory landlord of Liberal sympathies, he was always a
model administrator of his properties; and chief among these we, their
friends, counted Gloria, for she seemed--how can one suggest these
shades of understanding?--more particularly and peculiarly his wife than
are the wives of less fortunate men. It is said of the Carlyles that
they have always been bad to their women and that there has been no
charge on the female estate for more than two hundred years; but Aubrey
and Gloria were a charming couple. It was always quite evident that she
loved him--tall Gloria of the tiger-tawny hair and the funny crooked
smile like a naughty fairy’s; while it was equally evident--to those
few, of course, who could look beneath the aloof surface of the
man--that he treasured her enormously. And then, one day, she left him;
and she never came back.
Now Aubrey despised what he called the “trumpery parlour-tricks” of the
countryside. He was not civilised enough, he said. The elegant pastime
of killing a pretty fowl of the air without any risk to yourself, or of
chasing a scared fox across a county--though that was better, for you
at least risked a broken collar-bone--did not amuse him very much. He
was a hunter after wild beasts. And because you may not kill wild beasts
in England, for they walk on two legs and stern laws protect them, the
other four continents knew Aubrey Carlyle for many months in the year.
And because Gloria was not a hunter after wild beasts she stayed in
England, and was much with us in London, and we sometimes with her at
Malmanor. But she was an amazingly still woman.
The war came, and Aubrey was very happy at his pastime, legalised at
last, in Flanders, and grew to be a brigadier. And Gloria grew to be a
woman, for she had somehow seemed very young until then. The war gasped
to conclusion, and soon Aubrey was in South America, in the darkness
beyond the upper reaches of the Amazon. And when, one evening, he
returned to Malmanor, he found that Gloria was gone.